Page:Sketches of the life and character of Patrick Henry.djvu/70

 46 SKETCHES OF THE

virtues of his heart. He was well acquainted with all the forms of parliamentary proceeding; was an eminent lawyer, and a well informed and practical statesman.

Richard Bland was one of the most enlightened men in the colony. He was a man of finished education, and of the most unbending habits of application. His perfect mastery of every fact connected with the settle- ment and progress of the colony, had given him the name of the Virginian Antiquary.* He was a politi- cian of the first class; a profound logician, and was also considered as the first writer in the colony.f

Edward Pendleton, the protege of the speaker Robin- son, was also, among the most prominent members in the house. He had, in a great measure, overcome the disadvantages of an extremely defective education, and, by the force of good company and the study of correct authors, had attained to great accuracy and perspicuity of st}de. The patronage of the speaker had introduced him to the first circles, and his manners were elevated, graceful and insinuating. His person was spare, but well proportioned; and his countenance one of the finest in the world: serene — contemplative — ^benignant — with

��* Edmund Randolph.

■f " He was," says a correspondent, " the most learned and logical man of those vvho took a prominent lead in pubhc affairs ; profound in constitu- tional lore ; but a most ungraceful speaker in debate. He wrote the first pamphlet on the nature of the connexion with Great Britain, which had any pretension to accuracy of view on that subject ; but it was a singular one : he would set out on sound principles, pursue them logically, till he found them leading to the precipice which we had to leap ; start back, alarmed ; then resume his ground, go over it in another direction, be led again by the correctness of his reasoning, to the same place, and again tack about and try other processes to reconcile riglit and wrong ; but left his reader and liimself, bewildered between the steady index of the compass in their hand, and the phantasm to which it seemed to point. Still there was more sound matter in this pamphlet, than in the celebrated Farmer's Letters, which were really but an i^nisfatum, misleading us from true principle."

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